Interesting survey on Snow Leopard package managers

[Jack Howarth]

On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 10:22:57AM -0400, Jack Howarth wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 10:11:39AM -0400, Eric Tiffany wrote:
> > This Ars Techica thread has a survey about package managers on Snow Leopard,
> > and an accompanying thread regarding some of these 64bit issues.
> > 
> > http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/8300945231/m/494000521041/showpollresults/Y
> 
> > _______________________________________________
> > macports-dev mailing list
> > macports-dev at lists.macosforge.org
> > http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macports-dev
> 
> Eric,
>    As I said in a couple threads this weekend, the smartest thing for 
> MacPorts to do is adopt the usage of the config.guess patch (that is being
> evaluated by the config.guess maintainers) which I used to fix the gcc44
> package here (tickets 20838 and 21341). Assuming you don't want to bother
> supporting i386 builds on Snow Leopard machines that are defaulting to
> x86_64 code, this is the most transparent solution. The only alternative
> is to resort to what fink does in their packaging, test the default
> architecture with sysctl and then manually pass the --build/--host/--target
> triplets to configure.
>    I told there are a number of other packages broken on Snow Leopard
> in MacPorts because of the same issue. Does anyone have a list? I'll try
> them locally with the config.guess patch and add or open tickets for that
> fix.
>            Jack
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> http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macports-dev

You can pretty much write off gcc40, gcc42 and gcc43 for Snow Leopard.
I was the one who submitted the patches to gcc trunk to make certain
that gcc44 and gcc45 will build and pass its testsuite reasonably on
Snow Leopard. While I could have backported the patches to gcc43, the
earlier gcc releases are depreciated upstream. The general code quality
has improved between gcc43 and gcc44 for it didn't seem to be worth the
effort. FYI, the quality of current gcc 4.4.1 is shown here...

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-testresults/2009-07/msg01866.html

Ignore the objc errors as those are due to changes in 10.5/10.6 in the
Apple runtime which haven't been addressed yet. If you use the gnu
runtime they go away.
                     Jack